Creative articles about embroidery

Create your own embroidered buttonholes

I fell in love with the design of this lace when choosing fabric for my Sue Shirt.

The pattern of the Shirt has a buttonstand down the back and I wanted to create embroidered buttonholes inspired by the lace design.

With Bernina’s Embroidery Software, I was able to make them a reality!

What will be needed:

Pattern

I embroidered buttonholes on my Sue Shirt which is an Inspiration Magazine pattern that is free to download for the month of August 2022: www.bernina.com/inspiration-freebie

Follow my Sew along for the Sue Shirt (free pattern in August)

Digitize the Buttonholes

1. Select the Buttonhole Tool.
Found in the Digitize Toolbox on the left.

 

2. Click to make a Buttonhole and press Esc on your keyboard once you’re done.
We’re going to do one buttonhole for now.

 

3. Double click on the Buttonhole to call up the Object Properties.

 

4. You can change the shape of the Buttonhole.
Change the Slit length to 2mm bigger than your Button.

Decorate the Buttonholes

There are many ways to add embroidery designs to the Buttonholes. I chose to use the Pattern Stamp Tool for a quick but effective way to decorate my Buttonholes.

5. Select the Pattern Stamp.

 

6. Have a look through the Pattern Sets and choose a Stamp.

I chose to keep my decorations relatively simple as the design of the lace is intricate.

 

7. Click Enter on your keyboard and then Esc.

 

8. Resize the Stamp as necessary.

 

9. Activate the Grid to help with even placemen of the Stamps around the Buttonhole.
The grid icon is found of the right of the top Toolbar.
Choose where to place the first Stamp.

 

10. Duplicate the Stamp.

 

11. Rotate or mirror the Stamp and place it.

 

12. Duplicate, rotate and place as necessary.

 

13. If your Stamps are overlapping or even touching, you can Branch them together to optimize stitching.
For reference, check out Custom Embroidery Design with V9 software under the heading Branching Tool.

 

14. By repeating the above steps, I added another set of Stamps to replicate the lace detail.

 

15. Sequence the items.
For my design, the lacework should be stitched first then either the Buttonhole or the boarder.

 

16. Save, export or send to your Bernina machine via the WiFi Device.

 

If you are brave and have a big enough hoop, you can of course duplicate your decorated Buttonhole multiple times and place them evenly above and below each other. Then you can embroider multiple Buttonholes in one sitting.

Embroider

Pinpoint Placement

I have done a tutorial on Pinpoint Placement using the Grid technique in my Auto-digitized Embroidery Design with V9 blog post.
However, for the embroidered buttonholes I felt that the Free Pinpoint positioning technique would be best.

1. Mark the placement of the buttonholes on your garment.

 

2. Place the garment’s Buttonstand in the hoop with Tear-Away Stabilizer.
You will likely need to float the garment in the hoop and baste the Buttonstand to the stabilizer when embroidering the top Buttonhole.

 

3. Set up your machine for embroidery (refer to this blog post for the steps under the heading Embroider)

 

4. Once your design and hoop are loaded, open the information box (i)

 

5. Choose the Pinpoint Placement icon.

 

6. Select the Free Pinpoint positioning icon.

 

7. On the screen, touch the centre top of the buttonhole.
You can zoom in to better see.

 

8. Use the machine’s Multifunction Knobs to move the hoop so that the needle touches the top marking of the buttonhole.

 

9. Turn the hand wheel to bring the needle down to check the placement and adjust as necessary.

 

10. Select the Set button when you are happy with the placement.

 

11. On the screen, touch the centre bottom of the buttonhole and use the machine’s Multifunction Knobs to move the hoop so that the needle touches the needle the bottom marking of the buttonhole.
Check the placement with the needle.

 

12. Select the Set button when you are happy with the placement.

 

13. Close the Pinpoint Placement and Information window and embroider the design.

 

14. When ready, proceed to embroider.

 

15. Rehoop, repeat the Pinpoint placement and embroidery steps as necessary for each Buttonhole.

 

If there is enough space in your hoop to do more than one Buttonhole, you can duplicate the embroidery design and repeat the Pinpoint placement. This would save you having to rehoop as many times.

Attach the Buttons

1. Set up your machine to sew.

 

2. Watch this video for how to use the Button Sew-On foot #18.

 

Instructions for attaching buttons are from 1:48.
If you click where it says “Watch on Youtube”, you can then click on 1:48 in the video’s caption and the video will automatically jump to the correct place.



Tips

  • Double check that the overall size of the decorated Buttonhole will still fit within your Buttonstand.

 

I would love to see what you make, please feel free to share with me!
Remember to also tag Inspiration Magazine if you make the Sue Shirt.
Instagram
Facebook

-Hannah-Rose

 

Missed the free pattern download?

 You can purchase the pattern from Inspiration Magazine’s online shop

www.bernina.com/shirt-sue

Create your own embroidered buttonholes

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